Miami-Dade must get creative to reach unvaccinated Black residents, immigrants | Editorial

As masks start to come off for the fully vaccinated, following the latest federal announcement, it would be easy to slack off on vaccinations, especially in harder-to-reach communities. But for the sake of everyone’s health, we can’t.

We’ve seen two troubling indications recently that the state’s Black residents and some immigrant neighborhoods right here in Miami-Dade County remain woefully low in vaccination rates.

According to a recent el Nuevo Herald analysis, the county’s Central American and Haitian immigrant communities are disproportionately undervaccinated for COVID-19. While about half of all eligible county residents — 55.5 percent — had gotten at least one does as of April 30, that number fell to 41 percent in ZIP codes where the highest percentage of Central American immigrants live, such as Homestead, Allapattah, Little Havana and neighborhoods south of Overtown.

In Haitian immigrant communities, just 32.5 percent of the eligible population had been vaccinated in places such as Little Haiti, Biscayne Park, North Miami Beach and Westview.

Those figures track with similarly distressing information released by the state on Wednesday: Only 7 percent of vaccinated Floridians are Black, Politico reported. Of the entire Black population in the state, just 20 percent have been vaccinated, health department Deputy Secretary Shamarial Roberson said during a meeting of a state coronavirus vaccination task force. She said, “We have a lot of work to do.”

We agree, especially here in South Florida.

There’s no single reason for the lack of vaccinations. Language barriers play a part, along with lack of a Florida driver’s license as ID, a lack of convenient transportation, conspiracy theories and no paid time off to get the shot or recover from it.

But in the end, one thing remains. If we are going to get this pandemic under control, Miami-Dade has to reach people where they are.

Certainly, the numbers are much improved on COVID. Hospitalizations are down by about 17 percent in the last two weeks, statewide, and down 23 percent in Miami-Dade in the same period, the Miami Herald reported. For a place that was once the hotspot of the virus in Florida, those numbers are music to our ears.

But as vaccinations slow, we need to find new ways to reach those who haven’t — for one reason or another — gotten the vaccine. The stakes are high for all of us. The more the virus is transmitted, the greater the likelihood that vaccines will become less effective.

What can we do? Get vaccinated. Persuade others to get vaccinated. And think creatively about how reach those who haven’t gotten the shot.

Here’s an idea from a nursing home in Winter Park: Try a $1,000 bonus, with a twist. While workers at nursing homes and assisted living facilities remained astonishingly undervaccinated, a whopping 92 percent of workers at The Gardens at DePugh Nursing Center got the shots, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Each worker got $100 after the first shot. But no one got the remaining $900 until at least 75 percent of the staff was vaccinated. Peer pressure and cash — that’s powerful leverage.

At the coronavirus task force meeting, members tossed out ideas such as phone banks, community block parties, community ambassadors. We need to bolster our efforts here with that kind of thinking.

Erick Sánchez, an organizer with the South Florida immigrant workers group WeCount!, put it this way: “If they really wanted to get them vaccinated, they could have mobile sites, in cooperation with different organizations. We’d tell the people, and we’d get a lot of them vaccinated.”

To its credit, Miami-Dade inaugurated a mobile vaccination unit in January, which, at the time served seniors in public housing.

Still, It’s time for a new approach, Miami-Dade.